What’s Next for FLCAN

Even though lawmakers did not take up the Cathy Jordan Medical Cannabis Act in 2013, Florida CAN isn’t daunted or distracted from our mission. We are more determined than ever to see safe, therapeutic access to cannabis for people in Florida.

You can check out our reports about the legislative session but in short it was exciting, eye opening and encouraging. One southwest Florida lawmaker started our meeting by saying he KNEW cannabis was Safer than alcohol. A second owns a nursery business, he knows cannabis is an up and coming market and he wants in too. The battle was half won – at least they know the truth and for some of them its important. Now, getting them to act on the truth… another in a series of challenging things for CAN to accomplish.

For now, Florida CAN is ready for the next chapter.

The addition of Florida trial attorney, John Morgan, onto the list of Floridians actively working to change cannabis laws puts Florida squarely on course for some sort of legal medical cannabis scheme. Whether through an act of the Feds, through our state legislature or by popular vote in November 2014, legal medical access is coming to Florida.

To support the efforts of Floridians to change cannabis laws, we took a lease on a wonderful office just west of US 1 in Melbourne, FL. We need help now getting the place ready for the public. You can follow our progress here on our blog, on this page dedicated to opening the office, on our website or on Facebook.

Whether it is a gathering place for training, a collection site for petitions, a workspace for talented writers, graphic artists, would be video producers or a fun place to host a Sunday members-only pot-luck dinner, the office is going to be a great addition to the Florida reform efforts.

Our soft opening is June 19.  By the soft opening, we plan to have programs in place, jobs for volunteers and an idea what hours make sense for our volunteers and staff. We hope the public will embrace our July 14 grand opening. Our grand opening ribbon cutting ceremony will be at 12:30 July 14. We hope you’ll mark your calendar and make an extra effort to be counted among the faithful who will see cannabis safe, legal and available in Florida.

Drugs can't surrender

Nearly ten years ago my husband and I attended a presentation by Cato Fellow, Sanho Tree. Sanho had been studying US eradication efforts in South America. The presentation to a classroom full of University ofCentral Florida NORML students was a frank discussion of the havoc our drug problem was wreaking on native populations. 

Sanho talked at length about the War on Drugs but tonight, one of his observations echoes in my mind. 

If this is a War on Drugs and the drugs can’t surrender, how we will we ever work out an exit strategy?

We’ve been in Tallahassee for a month now, two weeks during committee hearings, a week when lawmakers were at home and last week, the first week of session. From the moment the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate gaveled the session open, the legislature was on the move. On the agenda, everything but an exit strategy for the war on drugs and safe, legal access to cannabis.

If we want sensible drug policy on the agenda this year, we need the seven out of ten Floridians who support medical cannabis to do more than just nod in agreement. We need a division of letter writers, tossing Letters to the Editor to every paper in the state. We need skilled wordsmiths to hone their material and head out to the city council meeting to battle for a resolution supporting legal access to cannabis for patients in Florida. 

If you live in the panhandle, know someone in Niceville or can find a good way to reach out to people who live in President of the Senate, Senator Don Gaetz’s district we need you to put boots on the ground. We need to take hearts and minds in those rural counties between Panama City and Pensacola. The heart of North Florida is home to the man who holds the fate of our patients in his hand. Until Senator Gaetz and Speaker of the House Will Weatherford are properly motivated to move on reforming cannabis then simply will let another year pass. 

The drugs can’t surrender and neither can we. Patients need access to the best medicine and in many cases, the best medicine is cannabis. Where do you stand in the War on Drugs? There are many things you can do to help, but nothing helps more than a person visit to your state lawmakers office. Learn who your lawmaker is by clicking here.

Calling to register your support for the Cathy Jordan Medical Cannabis Act (SB 1250 in the Senate and HB 1139 in the House) is really important and if you have a phone tree of friends, encourage them to call too. 

The battle cry – no surrender, no retreat.

Day 7 of the legislative session

53 Days remaining to provide safe legal access in Florida

Why the Drug War Puts Drug Dealers in our Middle Schools

Survey after survey, from schools across the country are telling us the same story, echoing what our own children are telling us; it’s easier to get some illegal drugs than alcohol or cigarettes. Often students will assert that they can get marijuana within 15 minutes to an hour. How did we get to this point? It’s not from a lack of effort, or funding. We were willing to fund what ever the never ending drug war seemed to require (asked for). 

Well  folks, the fact is that when a society prohibits the use or possession of something that is in demand, the distribution system changes and costs go up. Way up! The reality is, when you prohibit something you’re saying, “No one can have this. No one can sell it or produce it etc., without the threat of criminal penalties.” You’re giving up any real control.

Under prohibition, demand won’t disappear and users will have to pay more to continue buying and using. Eventually they’ll pay a lot more. They’ll have to, because the manufacturing is risky, the distribution is risky, and sales are risky. Everyone in the loop is now a criminal and subject to serious penalties. Everyone in the chain must make enough of money to balance their risks of being arrested and jailed, or robbed and beaten, or worse. The prices go way up. With high profits at stake criminal organizations stand to make a lot of money providing parts or all of these services. Their profits probably won’t be used to build new schools in your neighborhood or fund neighborhood healthcare. Legal sales of regulated and taxed substances could fund these types of things.

 When the criminal justice system (which is now at a much higher risk of corruption from these impressive profits made by people willing to work outside the law) manages to incarcerate these new entrepreneurs, they’re replaced the next day with others who see the opportunity worth taking the risk. Meanwhile we pay for the jail time, and court time, and support for his or her family now that they’ve lost a bread winner. It doesn’t seem like any of this prohibition has helped us out in the least! A thoughtful person can easily make a good case that this series of ill-advised laws passed over the years have done little except exacerbate the situation. More drugs being used, more arrests, more spent on prisons enforcement, eradication, gang problems, corruption, etc. have been the result.

These “entrepreneurs” (drug dealers) can be quite clever when it comes to protecting themselves from the law. It’s common for a mid level dealer (that means there is a lot of them) to work with local kids under 18 to “help” with his sales/distribution business. Since the advent of the zero tolerance laws passed in school settings, these students risk much more than they realize. Who do you think these local kids will contact to expand their sales? Their friends, your kid’s school chums.

So what do we do?

·         Educate, educate, educate. Real information, honest discussions. Join a group like FLCAN and educate yourself, your friends and family.

·          Change our laws to regulate these banned substances. Then we gain control. Control over quality, strength, storage, distribution (we card folks for beer, right?) and more.

·          Reconsider our drug testing policies in schools. The results of the testing have prompted the use of “harder” drugs that pass through the body more quickly than cannabis. Drug testing may keep “at risk” kids out of band, or football or any other extracurricular, the exact activities that help kids stay away from drugs. Let’s see if what we’re doing is working or not. 

L   Learn from history. We’ve been here before with alcohol prohibition. We saw the results of prohibition as we looked back at alcohol laws' consequences in our history. Prohibition bred the gangs, the drive by shootings, the turf wars, the corruption of government and police, the increasing production of whiskey instead of beer and much more.

 This doesn’t look like a drug war. It looks like a gift to those who are willing take a little risk to make a lot of money and not pay taxes on it. It looks like a gift to private prisons. It looks like a way to control people of color who are arrested far more than white people who actually use more drugs per capita. It works to disenfranchise certain aspects of society when they lose their voting rights.

Now we’re seeing the unintended consequences of our generation’s prohibition, “The War on Drugs”.  What is sad, is we never saw the results we were trying to achieve.

·         It’s up to us to say, “Enough, this isn’t working, it’s costing us a fortune, it’s risking our kids and our future!” What else needs to be said?